From Socialist Utopia (1984) to Capitalist Utopia (Brave New World)

Having reacted strongly against the disastrous folly of bureaucratic socialism our capitalistic consumer society is instead racing to realise the hedonistic prophecy of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”. However since it is propped up by a huge Ponzi scheme and is rapidly destroying the food-bearing potential of the Earth as well as impacting on the global climate, we desperately need another advance in consciousness. It should be realised that the great leap forward in consciousness of the Axial Age also emerged as responses to the rapidly changing political, economic and technological conditions at the start of the Iron Age. The sudden wide-spread use of electricity and exploitation of fossil fuels is destabilising our present post-industrial consumerist civilisation based on imaginary credit even more rapidly.

Industrial Western Civilisation is basically the institutionalised version of the Greek dualistic branch of the great flowering of consciousness of the Axial Age. It is simply more efficient in terms of what Weber called rationality, a combination of efficient machines and humans who function like efficient machines. Claims that the Modern “scientific” consciousness has succeeded in transcending the other axial advances is absurd. One only has to look at National Socialist Germany which was the perfect realisation of the Modern ideology free from inefficient and unrealistic religious values. Eugenically-perfect Aryan man, a reversion to a Northern European mythic-archaic archetype, became the icon of their reinterpretation of the ideology of individual Human Rights, the ethical-universal aspect of this branch of the Axial Age. Only if one’s aim is to force all other civilisations to come under one’s control or be eliminated, even though this is likely to destroy most life on Earth, can this development of dualistic Greek materialism be regarded as the superior branch of the Axial Age.